Something suddenly here that actually always has been

My computer's screen saver cycles through all the photos in my "My Pictures" folder. Since almost all of those pictures are of Doodlebug and Little Shmoo, we often find ourselves mesmerized by the screen saver. Even Doodlebug will stop as she walks by the laptop sitting on the kitchen counter and say "Awww...I was so cute when I was a baby!" (Of course, then we have to say, 90% of the time, "No, sweetie, that's actually Shmoo...but you were cute too!"). So, yesterday I got up from my seat at the coffeeshop to get a(nother) cookie, and my screen saver kicked in. I sat down to find this picture flash past me:

That was taken last January or February, I think. It's me, with Little Shmoo in the sling sleeping on my chest. At the time, I thought, in some vague and exhausted way, that it would be good to have a picture of her in the sling. She spent so much time there, and even though I was miserable, I figured maybe I'd want to have some pictures someday of her like this. Maybe someday I'd find it funny, or I'd groan jokingly about how much I carried her around. So, I took the picture into the bathroom mirror.

Looking at it now, it's emblematic in so many ways of that time for me. I look exhausted. I look too tired to care about anything. The picture is taken at a cockeyed angle -- it almost makes me feel unbalanced just to look at it, like I might fall. It's not a direct picture of me; it's a picture of our reflection in the mirror, because I couldn't really "get at" myself directly anyway. Shmoo is asleep and limp. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but knowing now what we didn't then, she probably preferred to sleep upright like that because it allowed her more room to breathe through her constricted trachea. So, all in all, it's a miserable picture.

It's taken in our downstairs bathroom, and just outside that door -- JUST outside the door, not five feet outside that door, is the room pictured below in a photo taken just a couple of weeks ago:

That's my kitchen, cleaned up for selling of course. Bright. Clear. Alive with the possibilities and potential of a fresh space -- clean counters for preparing delicious meals; a wide open table for sitting over tea and conversation, for Playdoh experimentation, for gift-wrapping, for nourishing all of us; sparkling floors just asking for a running slide in your socks or a tickle attack; a bright, open window, letting in the sunlight. And it was right outside that bathroom door, the whole time.

Of course, I'm being overly metaphorical. It wasn't outside that door. It was a year outside that door, and we had to take the long trip through the insomnia, the hospitalizations, the surgeries, the medical issues, the fear and the misery, but then, just after all of that, there it is.

All of a sudden, huh?